Archivio mensile:Febbraio 2017

arte

Every work of art is a work of street art

 



Here are some more artworks I did during the last months. I think the subject is something like “human doubts in a sea of oddity”. I spreaded these images around the web and exhibited them in public rooms that let me do it.

Doing this, as a full time artist, it happen to me to think that art is today just another source of images in a world that produces and uses thousands of images every day. There is a great demand of images, yes. But the value of a single image rarely is more than some cents – and rarely these few cents go to the author of the image.

So we – we artists and image-makers – walk around with wide opened eyes, taking everything our eyes meet and leaving some new image on the road. And sometime selling them, of course.

At the end, I could say that nowadays every work of art is a work of street art.

So, this is the point. I say it again: nowadays, every work of art is a work of street art.

Is it true? If you think at the world as a web of streets – real, virtual and metaphorical streets – I could say that yes, we live in the Street Art Era. We add artworks to the bunch of images rolling trough the world for a little fee, or for free.

Of course there is still the Market of art, and it doesn’t even want to listen about cheap artworks or artworks left along the streets. But so many artworks go around meeting many eyes and no buyers: they do have a weight. Perhaps this weight, this undefined worth is the way art is playing its role today.

arte, filosofia

A painting, an artist, a philosopher: The “Angelus novus” and its legacy

The great swiss artist Paul Klee made one of his most famous artwork, the “Angelus Novus“, in 1920, using the oil transfer method he invented  (a kind of monoprint). This amazing image owes part of its importance and fame to the words of german philosopher Walter Benjamin, who bought the monoprint and kept it until he was obliged to leave Germany in 1940, due to Nazis persecution.

Here’s how Benjamin read Klee’s artwork in 1940:

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.“[1]

I made a portrait of Paul Klee 3 years ago. It is the drawing below. I would put the “Angelus novus” inside it for the strong meaning it has in the current legacy of Klee’s work. The whole production of this great artist has had a great deal of influence in art, even today.

Here is the original “Angelus Novus”

 [1] W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, 1940

arte

Fantastical creatures, part 1 – The giants

 

As an artist, I met many fantastical creatures inside my artworks. It happens.

I want to talk about these beings. I hope you will enjoy it.

To start, I will tell you about the giants. What can we say about them? Giants are seekers. Most of the testimonies talks about lonesome travelers, usually not interested in people – but intrigued by their buildings.

The giants, we don’t know exactly where they hail from. According to some, they are descended from the Titans. Others say – and this guess is more beautiful – that they were born in groups or units, like suckers of an unclassified kind of plants. They were therefore born as vegetables, before differentiating as anthropomorphic animal individuals.

At the end of their life, according to the same sources, giants became stones, so to follow,  during their lifecycle, a palingenesis of the three Linnaean kingdoms.

There’s nothing I can say more specific. Images would be more clarifying.

arte, street art

Little Street Art I did last year – and now it’s gone

Street Art and its official sanction are the biggest innovations in Art History of the last 30 years. Ok, and Digital Art too.

Street Art has been assimilated by the art market and now street artists are not anonymous outlaws anymore. They are stars and their artworks are valued hundreds of thousands of $. But the official sanction has meant also that every street artwork can (just can) be deemed as a real work of art. This changed things.

But I’m not going to write about that, now. I just would show to you some street art works that are still anonymous and not made by a star (and worthless, obviously) : my ones. 🙂

my ones. 🙂